Why We Invested: LinkedField
Heartland Ventures recently invested in construction tech startup LinkedField. Why?
Eighty percent of construction firms report difficulty in filling open positions. Finding well-trained workers has continued to be a problem during Covid and the ensuing recession, indicating that this is a long-term economic problem and not one easily solved by a single hiring gadget. Instead, general contractors consistently must do more with less by getting as much as they can out of their young engineers, some of whom have little to no experience.
“One challenge we face is ensuring our inexperienced people know the right way to accomplish any given task without the need for micro-management,” says Doug Adams, Preconstruction Executive at Shiel Sexton Company. “The problem is inexperienced workers don’t know what they don’t know, so they don’t even know to ask.”
Comments like these from Shiel Sexton and other Heartland Ventures stakeholders helped us realize that construction firms can get more value in treating their labor challenge as a training issue instead of a recruiting issue. It’s the old “control what you can control” mindset. But how do you show a worker the answer to a question they don’t even know enough to ask? Enter Kevin Cheng and his vision for LinkedField.
Kevin and his team cut their teeth managing complex construction projects for tech giants like Apple and Google. Kevin saw that even the most sophisticated projects were understaffed in terms of people and experience. Workers were reactive instead of proactive, all because they didn’t have relevant training before they had to execute critical tasks. According to Dodge Data and Analytics, industry-wide, 61 percent of projects take longer than anticipated and the most common cause is re-work made necessary by inexperienced workers getting in over their heads.
Kevin recognized the value software could have in this antiquated industry and joined PlanGrid, a pioneer in construction management software. As a product strategist there, he led a team building a platform to give builders real-time access to traditionally static tools like blueprints.
That experience led to the concept behind LinkedField. LinkedField’s Insights product pushes quick tips and tutorial videos to workers in the field but only when they need them. Instead of conducting time-consuming, off-site training sessions on topics irrelevant to most workers, LinkedField’s GC customers now have a solution that recognizes personalized training needs in real-time, so that an inexperienced project engineer can execute critical tasks at the level of someone with 10 additional years of experience.
Insights is powered by LinkedField’s digital sign-in product. This innovative solution knows which trades are on-site and at what times, allowing Insights to identify the project phase and upcoming tasks to push the most relevant knowledge. All of this is done without a superintendent or senior project manager getting involved.
Heartland’s diligence process with LinkedField leveraged our fund’s typical approach. We connected LinkedField with executives at a number of large Midwestern GCs. The GCs uniformly recognized the value, were excited about the ease of implementation, and began asking about pilots. Even at the early stage of our relationship, three different Heartland Ventures stakeholders are close to finalizing paid pilots with Kevin’s firm.
We’re even more excited about what’s to come. Long-term, LinkedField will be positioned to leverage the data it’s collecting to create a digital identity for each worker and eventually transition into a labor marketplace to hire for job-specific skill sets, certifications, and experiences.
We are thrilled to be working with Kevin and his talented team and an exceptional group of additional investors, including PlanGrid Founder, Tracy Young, and D20 Capital.
If you are interested in connecting with LinkedField, or know of someone who might be, get in touch with me at conor@heartlandvc.com.
